1. CBS Trumpets "Humanity" and "Passion" of "Democratic Dream Team" Another day of rave reviews for John Kerry and John Edwards, especially from CBS. "It was the all important and perfectly choreographed first glimpse of the Democratic Party's new dream team," CBS's Byron Pitts gushed over video on Wednesday night of the Kerry and Edwards families on the lawn of Teresa's Kerry's Pennsylvania estate. Leading into a clip of John Edwards proclaiming that "people are desperate to believe again that tomorrow will be better than today," Pitts characterized that as expressing "humanity." Pitts soon trumpeted Edwards' "passion" and how "Kerry-Edwards... continue reading
1. Nets Treat Liberal Label for Edwards as Unsupportable Accusation Four years ago when George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, the evening newscasts adopted liberal assumptions about Cheney's "very conservative" record and eagerly passed along examples of his congressional votes which supposedly showed how his views were out of the mainstream. But on Tuesday night, the networks avoided the congressional record of John Kerry's vice presidential selection, John Edwards, largely ignored his liberal record and, when they did mention it, treated it as nothing more than a negative accusation from the GOP not worth supporting with... continue reading
1. Nets Pounded Cheney's Conservative Ideology, But on Edwards... Nets Pounded Cheney's Conservative Ideology, But on Edwards... Four years ago, the networks immediately pounced on the conservative ideology of George W. Bush's pick for Vice President, Dick Cheney. In the first 24 hours after Bush announced his choice, CBS alone tagged Cheney as "a bedrock conservative," "a rock-solid conservative" with a "a solidly conservative voting record" and a man whose "politics are of the hard-right variety." (See many more examples below from CBS and other networks.) But in the hours following John Kerry's announcement that he selected John Edwards as... continue reading
1. NBC News: "Any Recovery in This Country is a Work in Progress" NBC emphasized the negative on Friday night on the unemployment level while CBS found an upbeat angle, but still ended on a downbeat note. NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams acknowledged "good news" in how "the economy added jobs -- 112,000 of them in June -- and while unemployment did not rise last month, holding steady at 5.6 percent," he stressed the "bad news," that "the experts tonight say there's reason to worry because the job numbers came in below what they were expecting. And it is... continue reading
1. Nets Pounded Cheney's Conservative Ideology, But on Edwards... 1) Four years ago, the networks immediately pounced on the conservative ideology of George W. Bush's pick for Vice President, Dick Cheney. In the first 24 hours after Bush announced his choice, CBS alone tagged Cheney as "a bedrock conservative," "a rock-solid conservative" with a "a solidly conservative voting record" and a man whose "politics are of the hard-right variety." (See many more examples below from CBS and other networks.) But in the hours following John Kerry's announcement that he selected John Edwards as his running mate, despite the fact that... continue reading
1. One Quarter Percent Rate Hike: Layoffs and No Dream Houses The Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday hiked its federal funds rate by a quarter point to 1.25 percent, returning it to where it stood in June of last year, and still at a historically low level. But while NBC's Anne Thompson described the decision as "a vote of confidence in the recovery from the Federal Reserve," the CBS Evening News stressed the negative. Anthony Mason declared: "The era of cheap money is over." He ran through a dire forecast: "Your credit card interest rate will be rising. So will... continue reading
1. Brokaw Corrects Allawi When He Claims Saddam-al-Qaeda Link NBC's Tom Brokaw introduced his interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi by marveling at how he "still believes that Saddam was connected to al-Qaeda." When Allawi expressed that view during the interview aired on Monday's NBC Nightly News, Brokaw scoffed and corrected him: "Prime Minister, I'm surprised that you would make the connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq. The 9/11 Commission in America says there is no evidence of a 'collaborative relationship' between Saddam Hussein and those terrorists of al-Qaeda." But Allawi stood his ground: "I believe very... continue reading
1. "Many Will Not" Miss Bremer Who Left "Crumbling Infrastructure" Good riddance to Paul Bremer. From Baghdad on Monday's World News Tonight, Peter Jennings asserted that following the turnover of sovereignty in Iraq, "some people will miss" Bremer, the U.S. administrator for the Coalition Provisional Authority, but "many will not." ABC reporter Jim Sciutto soon noted how Bremer "said he was proud of what's been accomplished, but he leaves behind a country with more than 50 percent unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure." 2. Reminds Olbermann of How U.S. Fled Vietnam in Helicopters The quiet and orderly transfer of authority in... continue reading
1. CBS, CNN & NBC Skip Iraq Outreach to bin Laden Over Saudi Arabia Spiked by CBS, CNN and NBC again. Exactly a week after the CBS Evening News, CNN's NewsNight and the NBC Nightly News ignored Russian President Vladimir Putin's disclosure that Russian intelligence warned the Bush administration after 9-11 that Saddam Hussein planned to attack inside the U.S., the very same newscasts managed to skip over a Friday front page New York Times story about how top operatives in Hussein's regime approached bin Laden in the mid-1990s about working together against the Saudi ruling family and foreigners in... continue reading
1. Networks Jump on "Anonymous" Book Author's Critique of Iraq War An "anonymous" CIA officer who was demoted from the position of leading the tracking of Osama bin Laden, lashed out in a new book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism, at both the administrations of Presidents Clinton and Bush. But in jumping on the book's criticism of going to war in Iraq, the networks on Wednesday night concentrated their stories on his attacks on the policies pursued by President Bush. Only NBC's Andrea Mitchell gave a sentence to his criticism of how the Clinton... continue reading